Zombie Britain

After highlighting writers struggling to makes sens of Brown's new National British Party speech all week, this from Tom Nairn in OK and soon Prospect captures the mood perfectly...it's Britain as Zombie Nation.

Tom Nairn: "Since Gordon Brown’s appearance as United Kingdom Premier, assorted premonitions have surfaced in the gloom. Britlanders now inhabit a haunted house on the edge of a cemetery, where such terminology seems appropriate. Brown was not of course elected, parachuted from On High, or installed by an indignant mob: over many years he materialized in fits and starts, glimpsed intermittently like a ghost from times past, brooding but saying almost nothing. Then suddenly the spirit was there, seated all too comfortably in the Anglo-Brit living room, account-books and Britannic sermons to hand. The armchair’s previous occupant had left for Jerusalem.

Such is death-in-life.

The funniest sequence in Edgar Wright’s movie Shaun of the Dead (2004) was where Shaun, seeing that the living were now besieged by zombies, organizes a pretend-resurrection class at which people learn to stumble and stare properly, groaning in broken graveyard English. But that was just prediction: ‘reality’ is worse. No Shaun has appeared to rally the English. David Cameron seems convinced the mausoleum can be maintained by New-Dawn-speak — itself another trait of the late-Brit times, perfected by Blair. ‘Better yesterday’ had long been the UK’s chosen route to modernity. Under Brown it has reached its terminus.

The key zombie aim is graveyard peace: a new Consensus to leave the sacred essence unaltered amid ritual round-table acclaim, all-change orations, and deference-tours of Washington Beltway. Serious constitutional commentators like Anthony King and Vernon Bogdanor (see here) have been appalled not by Brown’s radicalism but by his timidity. However, what the famed indecisiveness masks is a death-wish: Posthumous Greatness at all costs, including Trident and two new super-super-aircraft-carriers.

Read the full bhuna at Our Kingdom (sic) right here.